Month: September 2012

Bigots to People are as Vaccines to the Body

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Bigotry, extremism towards other’s concepts or cultures, serves as emotional, intellectual and citizenship vaccines to people. A vaccine, injected into a body, gets the immune system alerted and instructs cells to fight back to defend the body. At the end, the body becomes healthier, and more immune from disease, while the vaccine cells are consumed and flushed out.

This is in short the essence of the analogy, and my prediction of the outcome from the last two week’s events that were inflamed by the crude, less than amateur, and profane video on Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him (PBUH). In the global village we are living in, the resulting inflammation will heal to better multi-cultural understanding, while ideological extremism and its promoters will run down into the history drainpipes.

To support my hypothesis, in this post, I’ll address the stimulus, the reactions, what would Prophet Mohammad do if he was present, the rationale behind these frequent disturbances, combating extremism at grassroots, how to talk about Prophet Mohammad, and conclude with how bigots helped the world get better.

The article in PDF format could be found here Bigots to People are as Vaccines to the Body.

On the 11th Anniversary of 9/11, Islam & Muslims: An Overview

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Eleven years ago, the world was shocked seeing planes flying into the World Trade Center towers. The chaos was overwhelming. People jumping out of top floor windows, in hope to escape imminent death to end up facing the same destiny, was nerve breaking. The shock of the 9/11 tragic events was startling. It was unbelievable, and irrational.

In this post, I would like to share with you some of our personal experience in the aftermath of the event. For the following weeks, I spent long hours into the late night, till my head drops, researching, verifying, compiling and annotating the text in a power point slides to create my first presentation to fellow Lucent engineers in Indian Hill campus in Naperville, IL. I wanted to give a digestible, without too much details, end-to-end picture on understanding Islam and Muslims. It covers, as much grounds as possible, the essential and typical questions people ask. Over the following years, I revised the presentation, and would like to share with you today…”Islam and Muslims: An Overview,” in power point show format, and have it also in native (.ppt) format.